Edithmead, Somerset

Tin tabernacle

As regular readers will know, I’m a great fan and regular user of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England books, to which I refer all the time and which also inspire many of the explorations of English buildings that lie behind this blog. I am in no doubt that the series, with its comprehensive coverage of architecture – first in England and then in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland – is one of the greatest works of art history ever, in any country.* If I have a reservation about the books it’s that, even in the fat revised volumes that are still appearing, they often stop short at even passing coverage the more modest buildings that in many places play a huge part in defining local character – the lookers’ huts of Romney Marsh, maybe, or the hovels of the Vale of Evesham, or plotland bungalows, or minor industrial buildings in some towns.† Or corrugated iron buildings, a personal obsession of mine, even though buildings made of this material are widely seen as minor and often temporary. There are, though, plenty of corrugated iron structures that are vital to their community and that have histories going back over a century.

I was pleased, therefore, when browsing in the Somerset: South and West volume of Pevsner to find a corrugated iron church mentioned at Edithmead, close to Burnham-on-Sea. Recently I was nearby, and stopped to have a look. What I found was a charming, white-painted ‘tin tabernacle’ not especially churchlike in appearance, except for the miniature spire and the bell at one end, but attractive nonetheless. If the rectangular windows and tiny structure without a separate chancel look unecclesiastical, there’s a reason. This building began life on another site, at East Brent, where it was an ‘Adult School’. It was brought to Edithmead in 1919 to serve the small local community as a daughter church to the one in Burnham-on-Sea. The congregation look after it well – although maintenance of a building like this is easier that the upkeep of a stone building; the main jobs recently have, I think, been painting the building and replacing the wooden window frames.

Thanks to the congregation, the tiny church with its modest spirelet and delightful cresting along the ridge of the roof, still looks good and locals were able to celebrate its centenary on the site in 2019. Hats off to the people of Edithmead – and to the authors of the Pevsner guide for pointing me towards a place of which, until the other day, I’d not even heard.

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* The revised volume for Wiltshire is the latest one I’ve acquired, and I plan to review it shortly here.

† All of which may be built in part of corrugated iron.

Buckingham

Hunting the Hart

During our recent stop in Buckingham, the town’s White Hart Hotel was looking particularly attractive with its hanging baskets, so I paused to take the photograph above. I wanted to show not just the flowers but also some detail of the Doric porch, which acts as a platform for the statue of the eponymous white hart with the traditional gold coronet around its neck. Although the White Hart is a very common name for an in or pub in England, relatively few have a three-dimensional image of a stag as their sign. I’ve seen a number of these in my time – a splendid standing stag in Okehampton, for example, with a magnificent pair of outstretching antlers, and another high up on the White Hart Hotel in Salisbury, which can, in the right light, be dramatically silhouetted against the sky.*

The White Hart symbol became well known during the reign of King Richard II (reigned 1377–99), who adopted it as his badge. He is said to have based it on the heraldry of his mother, Joan, Countess of Kent, whom the chronicler Froissart called ‘the most beautiful woman in all the realm of England, and the most loving’. The king’s retainers and followers would have worn the badge, and it appears several times on the Wilton Diptych, the superb portrait of the ruler now in the National Gallery.

Like many White Hart Hotels (and indeed numerous other urban hotels), the one in Buckingham is early-19th century in appearance – the flat front, symmetrical facade, and classical porch are all standard features of the coaching inns of the late Georgian and Regency periods. In those days Buckingham was a good stopping point on the journey between the Midlands and London, or between Oxford and Cambridge, and the White Hart was one of several inns in the town. And it was in earlier times too – the inn’s history is said to go back further than the Georgian era. It’s still a good place to pause when making the cross country journey from Oxford to Cambridge – or, as it was for us the other day, from the hills of the Cotswolds to the flatlands of the Fens.

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*See my Instagram account, @philipbuildings and scroll past recent posts, to see images of these.

St Neots, Huntingdonshire

Stand-out steeple

When it comes to skylines in small towns, it’s often a church that dominate the scene, not necessarily a large industrial building like the flour mill in my previous post. But here in St Neots, where I noticed that flour mill, is a fine Victorian church tower that makes another notable contribution to the skyline. Like the mill, it’s also (mainly) in brick, and it turns out to be the work of the same architect, Edward Jabez Paine (1847–1926). The Paine family owned the mill that Edward J. Paine designed, and they were religious nonconformists, worshipping at what was then a Congregationalist church (now a United Reformed church), so there was a close personal connection between architect and client here too. In fact the architect’s father was actually a deacon of the church, so Edward Paine was a natural choice for architect.

Paine built a good gothic church, with a spacious interior, well lit with big windows, and with a west gallery for extra seating. But the striking feature is the tower. This starts as a square structure and turns into an octagon part-way up. At the point where the metamorphosis takes place there are pairs of square pinnacles at each corner, and there are single eight-sided pinnacles at the corners of the octagon too. The octagon is topped with a short spire. The spire is slightly stocky, but this doesn’t detract form the overall effect – to my mind it sets off the octagon, showing off the brickwork and dressed stone of this part of the tower. St Neots was fortunate to get this building in 1888, a time when many dissenting churches were benefitting from the wealth of the successful business- and tradespeople in their congregations. In my opinion, the Paines did their church – and their town – proud.

St Neots, Huntingdonshire

‘Go’ in St Neots

Although I like to think I am good at spotting small, unregarded buildings, sometimes my attention is drawn irresistibly to the large and showy structures that stand out, whether in a rural landscape or in a town. Pulling into a car park in St Neots recently, there was one such building that I couldn’t miss, because its massive tower with corbelled top and striking tiled roof dominated the skyline in that part of town. The tower seemed to be an essay in polychrome brickwork, built to stand out, but what was the building that it was standing proud above? And how old could it be – was it from the brash 1860s or maybe somewhat later?

A stroll in its direction revealed a structure every bit as showy and massive as I’d expected from the tower. It was Paine’s Flour Mill, and its exterior walls are a riot of yellow brick, gothic arches, diaper patterns, and something resembling a Star of David beneath the arches of the upper stage of the tower.* Paine’s were a well established St Neots company founded by James Paine. They began as brewers and built their brewery into one of the town’s biggest businesses. But James’s entrepreneurial son, William Paine, expanded and diversified into all kinds of areas – flour milling, timber, and dealing in everything from building materials to coal. The interest in flour milling seems to have started when he bought a mill on this site, where he also built maltings for his brewing business. The mill was rebuilt in the 1880s, but the building that survives seems to be later than this one – there was a fire in 1905 and a rebuilding. A photograph online shows the present structure, with its gothic arches, under construction; this image is dated 1910, although according to Lynn Pearson, the mill reopened in 1909, so the actual date of the photograph is probably just before this.†

Another image of c. 1920 shows the mill complete with the tall corner chimney, which has now been taken down (its stump is visible in my photograph). Even in its current state, converted to flats, it’s still an imposing building and testimony to the industrial flair of the Victorians and their successors, who saw that a striking factory could be an effective advertisement. The architect was Edward J. Paine, grandson to the founder of the firm, suggesting that the building is also a memorial to a lineage that had in spades that active, strong-willed quality of movers and shakers that the Victorians called simply, ‘go’.

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* It’s not a perfect star but in any case the symbol was not, for the Victorians, associated only with Judaism; I’ve seen such stars in brick on 19th-century nonconformist chapels.

† See Lynn Pearson, Victorian and Edwardian British Industrial Architecture (Crowood Press, 2016).

Puddletown, Dorset

Here comes the Sun, or, Odd things in churches (14)

People who look carefully at old buildings will know all about the Sun Fire Office. It was an insurance company, founded in 1710, and it’s still going in a different form. It’s familiar to devotees of old houses because the company’s clients used to fix a metal plaque bearing the company name and symbol (the Sun in splendour, naturally) to the fronts of their houses. Then when the Sun sent out their fire-fighters, they would know you’d paid for the service and would attack the blaze with whatever equipment they had.

One aid to fire-fighting was provided by fire buckets filled with water or sand. One often sees bright red metal ones hanging on the platforms of stations on preserved railway lines. But back in the days when the Sun Fire Office first started, canvas buckets were also in use. I’d never seen these in a church before, but at Puddletown several remain, hanging from hooks under the west gallery. There are many more hooks than buckets, so perhaps originally there were more. More would be a good idea, as they’re not very large and a couple would not go very far when extinguishing a fire of any size larger than a smouldering pipe left in an absent-minded church warden’s pocket. These fire buckets now go on an informal list I keep in my head of fire-fighting equipment I’ve spotted in churches – fire hooks for removing burning thatch and the occasional rare hand-pumped fire engine are also included. All a far cry from today’s enormous fire engines with their turntables and ladders, but as welcome in extremis as their diesel-powered descendants can be today.